The door on the other side of the wall slammed shut, and Foster listened as footsteps stopped outside their room. He moved silently into position behind the door as Cynthia lay on the bed, flicking through channels on the TV with apparent nonchalance. A key turned, and the door swung slowly open. Foster held his breath, and waited. The vampire stepped into the room, barely more than a boy, twenty-one at most, with a bored look on his face and a gun in his hands.

“Where’s your—”

Foster brought the club down with all his strength. It hit the vampire behind his right ear, slicing open a wide flap of scalp and driving him down on to one knee. The gun tumbled to the carpet and red bloomed momentarily in the vampire’s eyes until Foster hit him again, and he slid unconscious to the floor.

Foster kicked the door shut, his heart beating rapidly in his chest. Cynthia was on her feet, staring down at the stricken figure with a look of outright disgust.

“Get the gun,” he said. “Don’t look. I don’t want you to see this.”

Cynthia nodded, picked up the gun, and stepped into the bathroom. As soon as she was out of sight, Foster brought the club down again, and again, and again, until all that remained of the vampire’s head was a lumpen smear on the carpet. He knew it wasn’t dead, but it would neither be able to follow them or raise the alarm, and that was good enough for now.

“OK,” he said.

Cynthia reappeared, glanced down at the crimson mess, then fixed him with a look of icy determination. She held the gun out towards him, grip first, and in that moment, he had never been more proud of her, had never loved her more.

He checked the weapon. It was a SIG-Sauer MPX with a full magazine. He nodded appreciatively.

Could be worse, he thought. Could be a lot worse.

Across the thundering field of battle, Paul Turner watched Allen, Ovechkin and Tán join the fight and smiled.

No second chances, he thought. Everything on the line.

Turner was near the western edge of the battlefield, having fought his way right into the middle, and allowed the flow of the chaos to take him to his left. He wasn’t keeping score of the vampires he had destroyed, but he knew it was already half a dozen, probably more; one or two had escaped the speeding stake of his T-Bone, but there was no time for him to be overly hard on himself.

The black-burnt remains of a shopping mall loomed in the darkness before him. He had chased a retreating trio of vampires, who had clearly reached the conclusion that their loyalty to Dracula was not infinite, towards the ruined building; they had disappeared inside, and Turner was taking a moment to compose himself before he went in after them. The Director part of his brain was telling him not to do so, that their nerve had clearly failed them and it was better to simply let them escape, but the part of him that would always be an Operator rejected that idea outright; the only way he would know for certain that they were no longer a threat was when they were dead.

There was a flash of movement, and one of his Department’s vampires dropped out of the sky beside him, flipped their visor up and smiled; it was Dominique Saint-Jacques, one of Turner’s most trusted Operators.

“Mind if I join you, sir?” he said.

Turner smiled. “Not at all, Captain,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The two men ran into the half-collapsed building, and immediately saw that the inside was even more badly damaged than the outside; the walls and ceiling were black, the floor tiles scorched and cracked, the shops and stalls annihilated so completely that it was impossible to even guess what they had once sold.

Dominique growled, then shot into the air like a bullet from a gun and disappeared in the gloom near the creaking, broken roof as Turner drew his stake. There was a heavy thud, then something fell down towards him like a meteor. One of the vampires he had been chasing hit the ground with a bone-cracking crunch, his eyes swivelling, one side of his face already swelling where – he assumed – Dominique had punched him. He darted forward and staked the twitching vampire, leapt out of the way of the ensuing explosion of blood, and moved deeper into the mall, scanning the dark corners for the two remaining vamps and the blackened ceiling for his colleague.

Another thud, from somewhere high above.

A second later, a female vampire tumbled limply out of the sky. She landed head first on the cracked tiles, and her neck broke as her skull flattened grotesquely on one side. Turner staked her as her eyes rolled and spun, then looked up in time to see Dominique land beside him.

“The third one is still here,” growled the French Operator. “I can smell him.”

“All right,” said Turner. “Let’s find him.”

They pressed ahead, into a section of the mall that was slightly more intact; the roof was less full of holes, the walls deep brown rather than sooty black. As they approached the exit at the far end of the building, Turner wondered for a moment if the third vampire had somehow slipped past them, or squeezed itself out through a hole and made good its escape. Then a low growl emerged from the corner of the wide space, and he saw what had happened.

The third vampire had backed himself into a corner from which there was no way out; the walls around him were still standing and the ceiling above was still solid, creating a concrete box that the vampire was pressing itself against the back of, his eyes glowing red, his face a mask of profound panic as he shook his head.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please don’t—”

Turner raised his T-Bone and shot the vampire through the heart.

It exploded with a dull whump, spraying the walls and floor with blood that gleamed almost black. He wound the stake back into the T-Bone’s barrel and faced his colleague.

“Good work,” he said. “Let’s get back out there.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dominique. “How are we doing?”

Turner shrugged. “Right now, I’d say we have the upper hand. But that’s not going to matter in the slightest if the strike team fails.”

Atop the medieval city, above the Basilique Saint-Nazaire, Dracula forced himself to ignore the delicious screams of pain and terror echoing from inside the church, and focus on the battle as it moved into its second phase.

The initial charge had decimated both armies, entirely as planned. Now the fighting was spread out across the wide landscape, as soldiers and vampires stalked and tracked each other through the ruins; he estimated that there were still more than three thousand men and women fighting for their lives below him. His enemies had done well in the early exchanges, as he had known they would, and it could have been argued that, at this moment, they had the advantage.

Which meant it was time to change the odds.

He drew his radio from his belt and pressed SEND.

“Yes, my lord?” said Osvaldo.

“Now,” said Dracula.

Captain Guérin was walking through the Field 1 gate when he heard something in the distance.

He was still disappointed at having been left behind when the Multinational Force moved out; he understood that he was not a member of a supernatural Department, and grudgingly accepted General Allen’s reasoning that somebody had to stay at the camp, but he wished he could have been out there, fighting alongside the Operators who had gathered from every corner of the globe. He had just conducted a patrol of the perimeter and was about to head back into the command centre to get the latest information from the battlefield, but now he paused.

The noise had been soft, as low and distant as the wind moving through the trees surrounding the sprawling camp, and the rational part of his brain assured him that was all it was. The primal part of his brain disagreed.